FREE ESSAY ON CARYL CHURCHILL

CARYL CHURCHILL

Caryl Churchill
Who is she and where did she come from?
Caryl Churchill is one of England's most premier female, post-modern playwrights. She has
strived throughout her career as theatrical personality to make the world question roles,
stereotypes and issues that are dealt with everyday, like, violence, and political and
sexual oppression. She has been part of many facets of performance throughout her almost
sixty year career. Not only has she been a strong force on the stage, but has also had
strong influences with radio and television. She is truly a talented woman dabbling in
not only a Brechtian style of theatre that has been commented on time and time again, but
also musicals of a sort. 
Churchill was born in London on September 3, 1938. She lived in England until the age of
ten when her family moved to Canada. There she attended Trafalgar School in Montreal
until 1955. At this time she moved back to England to attend Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
University. This is the key place that her career began. While studying English at Oxford
she took an interest in theatre. She wrote her first three plays while at the university.

Where has she been?
Radio plays
When her career in theatre and performance started at Oxford she began the first phase in
her career. She was very focused on sounds and voice. Her first three plays, Downstairs,
1958; You've No Need to be Frightened, 1959; and Having a Wonderful Time, 1959. All three
of these plays, extremely focused on sound, propelled her career into radio. For the next
ten years she concentrated her energy solely on radio plays, starting off with The Ants,
which she, herself, thought of it as a TV play, but my agent Margaret Ramsey sensibly
sent it to radio (Kritzner16). This focal point gave her many advantages in this time in
her career. Most important, of course, was its openness to new playwrights. In addition,
it offered an unusual freedom in that it placed few limits on length...Finally, radio had
already proved its potential for serious drama (Kritzner 16). During the time of her
writing for the theatre and her sounds phase, she was looking outward, investigating new
places for her to take her art. She wrote a few stage plays during her radio stint, none
of them being produced. She re-wrote some of her radio plays and eight of them were
produced between the years of 1962 and 1973. She then moved on to television plays. She
became very unsatisfied with it very quickly, commenting that
Television...attracts me very much less...It has the attraction of a large audiences and
being the ordinary peoples' medium and not being the sort of effete cultural thing that
no one ever pays any attention to anyway. But as an actual medium, as a physical thing
that happens, I don't find it anything like as exciting myself as the stage. I do like
things that actually happen. (Kritzner 45).
It was then time for her to make a change.
Stage plays
After a dozen years of writing primarily for the radio, Churchill finally made her move
to the mainstage. She wrote Owners for Micheal Codron. The play was produced by the Royal
Court Theatre in 1972. Her career went uphill from there. She became associated with a
sphere of the sometimes conflict-ridden but always politically daring and artistically
committed theatre often referred to simply as 'the Court' (Kritzner 61). Churchill's
reputation became paired with the Royal Court. She became the first female resident
dramatist, and later help with the Young Writer's Group program. During her time at the
Royal Court she wrote many plays, still focusing a great deal on sound and voice. At the
same time as she held position of resident dramatist, she also worked at other theatres
and with other groups. She founded the Theatre Writers' Group, now known as the Theatre
Writers Union, and had works produced by Joint Stock Theatre Group and Monstrous
Regiment.
Historical plays
During her previous playwriting time she had been very centered in time around her
present. Starting a new phase in her career in the mid-1970's, she began to look at
history and place her plots in appropriate time frames to make her objective, within each
play, more vivid. Paired with the Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, Churchill
multiplied her ideas, intensified her energy, expanded the range of viewpoints she was
able to encompass, presented fresh avenues for theatrical experiment, and helped her
develop an integrated feminist-socialist critique of society (Fitzsimmons 29). From this
position she wrote many plays such as Vinegar Tom and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.
During this time the Brechtian influences came out full force. She went, in this time,
full scale from emulating him to pointing out bold differences between herself and the
heavily influential force of Brecht. Her historical plays did not only show an overview
of the set period but subjected traditional versions of the historical phenomenon to
critical revision ( Kritzner 84). She also uses this movement of her career to empower
her audiences to take an active role in the play by reclaiming their own history. The
plays challenge not only the thoughts and practices of the past and of her present, but
also that the reputations of history be regarded as sealed records not amenable to change
in the present.  (Kritzner 84). 
Where was she?
Sex and Gender
The next move that Churchill made in her career was to attack the ideas of gender in her
society. This is the area she was in while she wrote Cloud Nine. She discarded her
previous focus of Brecht, but still took some of the fundamental teachings with her. In
an introduction to the play, written by Churchill herself, she describes her thought
process during the writing of the play. 
Originally I thought it would all be set in the present like the second act; but the idea
of colonialism as a parallel to sexual oppression, which I first came across in Genet,
had been briefly touched on in the workshop. When I thought of the colonial setting the
whole thing fell quite quickly into place. Though no character is based on anyone in the
company, the play draws deeply on our experiences, and would not have been written
without the workshop (Churchill viii). 
The use of cross gendering as well as cross-culturalizing in the first act has completely
changed our current ways of production. This device is not used out of sheer
conventionality, but out of necessity for the characters and the impact of the plot. 
By mismatching the performers with their stage roles, Churchill underscores the
artificiality and conventionality of the characters' sex roles. A clever theatrical idea
thus serves a dramatic purpose, and the sexual shenanigans that result give rise to more
than just the predictable cheap laughs (Asahina 565).
In this play we see two very distinct acts, a style in which later in Churchill's career
she will use incessantly. In one act we are in colonial Africa in 1880. Act two we are in
London in 1980, but for the characters, they have only aged 25 years. The ideology of the
Victorian family is shown to interweave class and male superiority, and hence to suppress
female sexuality and homosexuality....the second half is merely a series of isolated
portraits of more libertarian sexual relationships in the 1970's... (Wandor 7). During
the entire introduction of the characters to the audience we hear an actual echo of the
characters trying to be what Clive wants. Joshua, the Black servant, says What white men
want is what I want to be. Clive's wife, Betty, states I live for Clive. The whole aim of
my life is to be what he looks for in a wife. Other characters resonate the same. The
actual introduction of the characters is presented in the form of a song. This leads us
to believe that these characters never question their roles because they believe it and
it is so ingrained within them, that they could never think differently, especially with
the strong force of Clive present. In the second act the characters are also played by
their appropriate sex with the exception of Lin's 5-year-old daughter played by a man.
Once again it takes the role of a dramatic device to further the action and the thoughts
of the audience. The characters, without Clive, in the second act try to find out their
own roles pertaining to themselves instead of dependent on a White, male figure telling
them who they are.. This play is steeped with qualities and devices that help Churchill's
point ring with clarity.
Where did she go?
Revisiting the Past
After the acclaim of Cloud Nine Churchill made yet another change to her 
style. She became focused on a broader range, dealing now with social critique instead of
the feminist-socialist approach of earlier in her career. Her works during this phase,
namely Top Girls, Fen, and Serious Money, showed her revisiting past personal styles and
revising them. It showed her extracting elements from both the epic and personal areas of
theatre, reshaping traditional devices, and melding all of these factors into a truly
original style (Kritzner 138). These plays tend to have a lesser approach of optimism
than those previous in her career, but she continues to question the set up of society.
Revising Myth
Revision of myth, as I have found, is a typical element in most feminist writings. The
analysis and re-analysis of the construction of modern day thought is a device widely
used. This was Churchill's next implement. She wrote A Mouthful of Birds and Ice Cream
under this style. Alicia Ostriker, a writer of mythical poetry, wrote that there are
three main reasons why women writers go towards the mythological side of life.  to be
taken seriously as a writer, to get at something very deep in herself, and to release an
imprisoned meaning not yet discovered in the previous versions of the myth (Kritzner
172). As far as many critics have found, this shows Churchill's renewal of interest in
the combination of personal experience and political analysis and the knowledge of there
inseparability of reason and emotion (Kritzner 172).
Now
Since her last known movement Churchill is still writing plays and changing her style.
She has written musicals and many plays with two unrelated acts that somehow are
intertwined. She continues to question society with such works as Blue Heart, Hotel, and
Hot Fudge. 
Bibliography
Works Cited
Asahina, Robert. The Hudson Review, XXXIV 1981.
Churchill, Caryl. Cloud Nine. Pluto Press, Ltd. London, 1979.
Kritzner, Amelia Howe. The Plays of Caryl Churchill. St. Martin's Press, NY, 1991.
Wandor, Michelene. Free Collective Bargaining, Time Out, 30. March-4 April 1979.